Rehab centers, a get-rich-quick scheme? Sad, but true. As a result of the Affordable Care Act, addiction treatment has become, for some, an opportunity to make money easily and quickly. Enormous amounts of money and resources have poured into a proliferation of treatment centers and sober homes all over the country, with a huge representation in Southern California. These investors believe that with 24 million addicts in the U.S. and only 10 percent accessing care annually, building more beds will result in more people accessing care.
With the onslaught of venture capital into our industry, new “creative” ways of boosting revenue have come with it. Some new centers are waiving co-pays and deductibles, not charging for sober-living rent and engaging in patient brokering by creating call centers and illegitimate websites. While many of these activities may not be illegal, they are detrimental to patients and can cause insurance companies to deny or limit access, and authorize lower, less expensive levels of care, across the board.
These circumstances may seem overwhelming at first glance, but I know there is a solution. With my 40 years in the industry, I am truly passionate about getting our industry back on track, and I encourage other good players in the business to join this movement with me. My vision is to get individuals from insurance carriers, the community, and reputable, licensed, certified and accredited providers to come to the table together, to stay in the solution, and hold ourselves accountable for “keeping our side of the street clean.” We can all come together without trouncing on civil rights, upholding good legislation, and creating healthy parameters for both providers and communities. The insurance carriers will ultimately win, and save money, if they authorize access, as we know $1 invested in treatment results in $7 of national savings.
I suggest we create pods of providers, legislators, insurance carriers and community members to work collaboratively for a solution. Include the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers in the discussion, as well as the co-chairs of the Recovery Caucus and Executive Leadership from national insurance companies. Personally, I’m creating a space to start the conversation by hosting a Jeffersonian Dinner at the New Directions for Women campus in Costa Mesa on August 23. I challenge you to host a gathering of your own, so we can begin a fruitful conversation about where we need to go and who we need to be in order to solve this problem. By having these conversations with each other, it will help us create pathways forward ensuring more people can achieve a lifelong journey of recovery from substance use disorder, a chronic incurable disease.
It is clear to me that we must address the many bad insurance carriers, who simply deny access to care and find new ways of limiting a benefit that a person has every right to access. There are communities that are shrouded in stigma about addiction, and group all players, good or bad, in the same overarching category. There are also bad physicians, who can make larger profits by utilizing unnecessary maintenance drugs, or prolong the patients’ addiction without monitoring the person’s readiness to enter higher levels of recovery treatment.
Of course, there are many good people as well. Addiction treatment providers that have been around for decades, are reputable and accredited, and who are driven by the mission of helping to save lives. There are good communities that welcome healthy providers and want to ensure they are doing good work with the right intentions. There are insurance carriers that do want to help save lives, however don’t understand substance use disorders enough to know the intensity or duration of time that is really adequate to help someone on a lifelong pathway to recovery.
The solution is not to lose ground, backtrack and re-create bipartisan laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, or the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016. The answer to any devastating problem is to stay in the solution, not in the problem.
Rebecca Flood is executive director and CEO of New Directions for Women, a world-renowned, exclusively female, private drug and alcohol rehab program providing social model residential addiction treatment services for women of all ages.